Business data is a source of valuable information and can provide a competitive advantage if the data can be quickly and accurately analyzed. Finding valuable information hidden in large amounts of data, though, can be quite challenging. Business service researches, for example, need to compare daily market changes and sales growth rates. This information, however, can be concealed in vast amounts of data. Visual data comparison techniques can be extremely useful for revealing such valuable information hidden in data.
Visual data comparison techniques include simple graphical techniques, such as bar charts, pie charts, and x-y charts. These simple graphical techniques are easy to use but offer limited information, especially for visually evaluating large amounts of business data. For example, simple bar charts or pie charts show highly aggregated data while simultaneously omitting many other data values, such as data distribution of multiple attributes, patterns in data, correlations, or other detailed information.